I've never quite forgiven the critic Andrew Sarris for backing down on his famously negative assessment of Billy Wilder's movies in his 1968 auteur-based survey The American Cinema. Far from placing Wilder in his pantheon of the greatest directors, Sarris quarantined him within his starkly named Less Than Meets The Eye section, alongside other figures of contestable quality such as John Huston, Lewis Milestone and Fred Zinnemann. The book contains dozens of imperishable phrases and judgments, but few stick in the mind like the opening of his Wilder demolition: "Billy Wilder is too cynical to believe even his own cynicism." Oof. And still true.

Sarris later conceded most of his ground, possibly because even bad 60s Wilder (the shriller stuff that was in the air when Sarris was writing: Irma La Douce, Kiss Me, Stupid) couldn't help but look better with the passage of time. And, as was the case with almost every other director in Less Than Meets The Eye, Wilder did knock out a few classics; to my count, four: Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and the just re-released The Apartment.

With Wilder, I find that it's a matter of who he collaborated with, and whether they could tamp down his effervescence and his more cynical down-with-everything instincts. The delightful-sounding writing partnership between the gum-chewing, slang-slinging, jodhpurs- and baseball cap-clad Wilder and the imperturbable East Coast brahmin Charles Brackett seemed like the ideal creative combination of accelerator and brake pedals. The same, despite the loathing they felt for one another, went for Wilder's productive teaming on Double Indemnity with another buttoned-up polar opposite, crime writer Raymond Chandler.

Deprived of a restraining presence when he split with Brackett in the early-50s, Wilder went right overboard with his noirish journalism melodrama Ace In The Hole, a nihilistic howl that's been positively reassessed in recent years but which I still cannot bring myself to admire. (For ultra-prescient demolitions of the modern media, give me Elia Kazan's A Face In The Crowd.) And despite the relative wonders of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, his late-career teaming with co-writer IAL Diamond saw his movies becoming steadily less interesting visually and steadily more noisy and tin-eared. Perhaps, as antic Mitteleuropean fatalists who had both fled Europe before the catastrophe, their temperaments were too similar, too agreeable, for effective self-assessment. I cite the diminishing returns of The Fortune Cookie, Fedora and Buddy Buddy.

Wilder was four times a great director, and several more times a very good one. So were William Wellman, William Wyler and many other outcasts of Less Than Meets The Eye. I think they all, Wilder included, still belong there.